After rolling in the mud for nearly two months desperately trying to find some reason, any reason… you know, other than facts… for their November 8 loss, Barack Obama, the Democrat Party, and their handmaidens in the Old Media complex have finally found their perfect scape goat: It wuz the Russians wut dun it.

Of course any look at the facts we have before us will prove that there was never any hacking of the election. And even if Russian hackers had something to do with the hacking of the Democrat Party and Clinton chief John Podesta’s email system from which months of leaks emerged in drip-drip fashion damaging Hillary’s campaign, that is not the same thing as saying “the election was hacked.” Hacking John Podesta’s badly safeguarded emails is NOT the “hacking” of the election.

But damn the truth, since just after the election Barack Obama has been selling the fiction that the Russians “hacked the election” and ostensibly selling that as the reason Hillary lost. But thus far there has been absolutely no proof at all that any of the 50 states and all their many millions of machines in their thousands of voting districts were electronically messed with in any way at all. One would think that Obama loves this whole thing. The fake news of a Russian hacking is his excuse du jour.

So, even though we have no evidence, Obama has been ramping up is anti-Russia actions which have now resulted in the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats and government employees based here in the U.S.A.
One of those expelled was even reportedly an embassy chef. I guess Obama thought this guy might hack someone’s lunch, or something.

And dutifully following the lead of their boss, the left-wing media has been desperately searching about for stories to give credence to Obama’s new diplomatic war on Russia. In fact, just last week, The Washington Post rushed to push a story about Russians hacking the U.S. electric grid in Vermont.

Late on Friday, December 30, after Obama had announced he was expelling the Russian diplomatic contingent, the Post rushed out a story entitled, “Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont, officials say.”

The tale breathlessly told of a Vermont power plant that was “hacked” by the Russians leaving the U.S electrical grid open to their malicious intentions. It would have been a scary tale… if it were only true.

It turned out that the paper never bothered to get any quotes or the straight story from people at the actual power company that was supposedly hacked and when those folks finally spoke up they informed the nation that only one laptop that was not connected to their systems had been found with outdated Russian malware code on it. There was never for a second any fear that the “U.S. electrical grid was hacked,” as the paper tried to claim in its early treatment of the story.

One wonders if Washington Post writers Adam Entous and Juliet Eilperin will face any repercussions for their failure to do their due diligence?

The wild-eyed, Obama claims that the election was hacked has been been dispelled by no less than liberal Matt Taibbi in none other than screamingly leftist rag Rolling Stone magazine.

Being a leftist, Taibbi likens Obama’ blithe, evidence-free claims that Russia hacked the election as something akin to the false stories put out by the Bush administration about Iraq’s WMDs in the run up to his invasion of that country.

“The problem with this story is that, like the Iraq-WMD mess, it takes place in the middle of a highly politicized environment during which the motives of all the relevant actors are suspect. Nothing quite adds up,” Taibbi wrote on December 30.

What ever you believe about Bush’s claims about Saddam’s WMD’s, Taibbi has a point. This whole “Russia hacked the elections” story has not been verified by a single independent investigation and is based solely on Obama’s vague proclamations.

There isn’t a scintilla of proof that the Russians hacked anything. There is no evidence that Vladimir Putin’s government had any involvement at all with any hacking. We should all be open to seeing real proof and making our assessment based on that, but thus far we have nothing., zero, zip, nada, to lead us to conclude that Russia hacked anything.

If even as liberal a writer as Matt Taibbi says this, you know that something is “not adding up” here.

Other left wing journalists are also wondering where the real proof is. Tech writer and former Gawker employee Sam Biddle is also noting that hacking of the Democrat National Committee’s emails is not the same thing at all as saying “the election was hacked.”

Biddle concludes that the hacking of the flagrantly un-secure DNC servers is not “enough to indict Russia’s head of state for sabotaging our democracy.”

Further, other techies have pointed out that Obama’s own report, the one he is presenting as “proof” that Russia hacked the elections, is filled with bad info and shaky conclusions. In Fortune magazine, for instance, cyber Warfare expert Jeffrey Carr slams the Obama report.

In the magazine, it is said Mr. Lee is shocked at how badly the President’s report is written.

“But he highlights extensive sloppy mistakes and limited practical data in the Grizzly Steppe report,” Fortune says. “A list of names used to identify hacking campaigns, such as APT28 and COZYBEAR, inexplicably mingles in the names of both malware tools and capabilities. Data intended to help network administrators block attacks is missing vital IP addresses and attack timelines.”

So, we have no proof for any of Obama’s claims yet he is suddenly on a crusade to punish Russia only weeks before he is to leave the office of the president to Donald J. Trump.

As a result, many see a political motive, here. Liberal writer David A. Graham from the Atlantic even wrote a piece shocked that Obama’s actions seem bewildering to nearly everyone.

But others are pointing out that Obama’s actions are clearly meant as a petty attempt to hurt Donald Trump before he even takes office.

Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway, for instance, said she was fully cognizant of the claim that Obama’s new Russia sanctions are meant to “box in” our newly elected president who hasn’t even taken the oath of office yet. She said that the idea that Obama is working to undermine Trump seem quite logical.

The likelihood that this is probably the better read on Obama’s actions are buttressed by the fact that Obama spent the better part of the last two years thwarting Congress as it tried to get tough on Putin.

Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, for instance, recently said that Obama has spent a lot of time “undermining” congressional efforts to address the problems Putin has been causing in the world. Appearing on “Fox News Sunday” over the weekend, Cotton said that the White House continually lobbied Congress to go easy on Russia supposedly for fear that the State Department’s diplomatic efforts would suffer if Congress got tough on Putin.

So, all this time Obama has been soft on Putin until weeks before he leaves office? It is all pretty fishy, isn’t it?

Granted Russia is not our friend and I am not saying that Obama is maligning an ally. But what I am saying is that Obama is scapegoating Russia in order to cover for Hillary Clinton’s loss and for his own massive destruction of his own party. Obama’s last second finger pointing at Russia is only a smoke screen meant to hide his failures.
____________“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson

Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as Constitution.com, CanadaFreePress.com, BizPac Review, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.

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